User Interface, Not Speed, was IE8's Top Priority

When developing Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s top priority wasn’t building the browser for speed, but making sure that the user interface was unlike any other.

During a press demonstration for Beta 2, Microsoft’s product marketing director, Stephani Kimmberlan, explained that the browser wasn’t built for performance benchmarking, and that it would be premature to run speed tests on the browser before its final release.

Kimmerlan also noted that the browser’s important features were “user-interface enhancements”; things like the Accelerators (a basic, right-click shortcut menu) are just part of the many ways IE8 automates near simple tasks for easier accessibility.

Microsoft also demonstrated the browser’s enhanced search box feature, adding that unlike Google’s Chrome, the search feature didn’t send any data back to home base.

Comments

Well I'm using Google's Chrome and it's awsome but a browser from a company that screamed and pouted as loud as google did when Microsoft made it difficult to change search engines in IE7 Chrome is even harder to do if not impossible. At least MS made it easy to change the Search provider Chrome is impossible.

I hope that MS does spend time on speeding up IE8 to compete with Chrome but Chrome and IE8 are really different animals alltogether. IE8 is supposed to get a 100% Acid3 test score. Chrome and no other browser can do that. So perhaps being slower is a side effect for being a 100% accurate web browser.

Keith...? uh...wow, really? I mean I'm like 99.9% there with most everything you say around here, but I guess I'm just surprised to hear you say that it's hard to change search engines in Chrome.

Forgive me (seriously) if you know this already, but you can just right-click the address bar, select "edit search engines" and a list pops up with all the engines it knows already, just pick whichever one you want as your default. Chrome can also "absorb" other search engines or even just search functions at various sites, just by you going to the site and performing a search...the site should then show up in that list of available search engines.

AND any site that you can't add by just visiting and searching the site, can be added manually, just by pasting the search string URL for that site's search (like for newegg it's http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Description=%s&x=0&y=0)

AND any site on that list that isn't your default still has keyword capability for searching from your address bar (like for google maps, I just type "gmaps<tab>" in the address bar and can search it from there

I dunno, maybe just a difference of opinion on that...but I love how easy it is to change/add searches to Chrome.